Chapter 4 The Third Station

Marlborough was a posting yard of forty stalls and the Bath company had four horses in it, and the yard-master was a man called Pryce who had a way of looking at a bag that she came to recognise later as the look of a man in the trade. "Fourth seal makes five," he said, counting. "No. Three and four. You'll be the ninth at the Chute, and the ninth is Marlowe's, and the Chute is the end of the chain." "I understand." "Do you." He set the bag on the bench. "There's nine on a bag and a man says nine, and there's nine on a bag and a man says eight, and one of those two men is telling you a thing about a bag and the other one is telling you a thing about himself, and which is which is the whole of what I have learned in thirty years." He went along the flap with his thumb. "You're new on this road. You ride like a man who learned from a book, which is not a compliment, and you hold a bag like a man who has never had it off, and I've seen a good deal of that in my time and most of it's women." "Then you'll not be surprised," said Temperance, "and you'll not remember it." "No," said Pryce, and gave her a horse. "I'll not." The road to the west went up over the Marlborough downs and then came down into a country of enclosures and a very great many sheep, and she was six miles over the top when she saw the man on the chestnut pony again, four hundred yards back, keeping pace. He was on her the whole of the afternoon. He came within a hundred yards twice and she turned about both times, and the second time he was close enough for her to see that he had no pistol and was carrying a stick, which was worse, because a man with a pistol is a soldier and a man with a stick is a lawyer's clerk. She got off at the gate and put her back to a wall and made the animal stand across the road, and she thought about the wax for about as long as it took to count to forty. She had been told three times, by three different men, in three different ways, and none of them had said it in so many words. Crag had said a chain of eight houses. Foss had said the only mystery was which body's carrying it. The man on the cob had said the whole of what a chain is, and he had said it to her, which meant it was not in the trade's mouth at all, and which meant he had wanted her to know it. Eight houses. Three done. And a wax that a thumbnail would take, and no law in England that would punish a man for taking it except the law of a signature on a piece of paper, and the signature being that of a man in Bath who was at that moment asleep and would not know for three days. "So it's not a bag," she said, out loud, to the horse, which was the second time in two hours she had said something to it. "It's eight men who have all decided not to." The man on the pony came up within a hundred yards, and she swung in front of the animal and put herself between him and the cantle, which was the single most dangerous thing she did in nine days and the only one she never once regretted. At the fifth mile of the descent she stopped at a gate and let the horse have its head, and let the man come up, because a man who has been following a rider for eight miles has something to say and the road was empty and the light was going. "Reeve," the man said, when he was alongside. "I'll not trouble you. I'd sooner have the words than the bag." "Take them." "It's Mr Dunmore's business. That's all I'll say, because if I say more and you carry it to Bath, then the paper's good and I've been a man who stopped a courier on the Marlborough road for nothing." He spat. "I was told a Bath bag goes down this week. I was not told what was in it, and I've not asked, and I'd not have asked. But I'll tell you what I know, which is that there's two of us and there's not many days, and if you're a man being paid by the ounce then you'll be on the road in the dark, and there isn't ten miles of this road that a man can't be off his horse in the dark, and there's four inns on it that won't ask a courier's name in June of 1815 unless somebody's paid the landlord first." "Who's the other one?" "That's my business and I'll keep it." He turned his pony. "You did well not to run, and I'll say that much, because the last one ran at Marlborough and the man who had her wasn't a lawyer's clerk, he was a man who had been at Copenhagen, and she lost the bag in the River Kennet and the paper in it and the girl was never heard of again after. Not her either. That's the thing people don't understand. Losing a bag costs you the paper, and then the paper being gone costs you the road, and then the road being gone costs you the only trade a person like you has." He put his stick across his horse's neck. "I'm not going to stop you," he said. "I'd have stopped the last one and I've thought about it since and I'd not do it again. I'm telling you the road so that you use it, and if there's a man on it at night from here on then it's because of the two of us and not because of you, and you can say so to whoever's paying you and they'll believe it because they'd have sent us." He wheeled the pony round. "Nine seals is a long chain, Reeve. Any one house can break it. That's the whole of what a chain is. It isn't strength, it's the number of places it can come apart." She came down off the Marlborough downs into the dark with a good horse and eleven miles of road that a man had just told her about, and she sat the horse at the first gate and took out the bag and looked at it. Seven seals and eight, the wax hard and the ribbon tight across the flap, and a thumbnail would do it, and there were four inns between here and the water. "I know," she said out loud, to the horse. "But it's the wax or it's nothing." And she put it back lashed behind the cantle and rode on, and that was the last time in nine days she said anything to a horse.